About

I’m a Boomer. I’m also a “Little Old Lady from Pasadena” like the Beach Boys sing about. I grew up in Pasadena, CA with the Korean War and air raid drills as backdrop to what looked like an idyllic 1950s childhood.  I’m the second of 7 children with 1 older brother, whom I idolized. My senior year of high school I had the life-changing experience of living in Sweden as an American Field Service exchange student.  After a couple of years of college, I went back to Europe to study in Germany and could speak 6 languages by the time I was 20.  I worked as an interpreter for a few years as I became involved in the social justice movement and politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

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Through some amazing serendipities I landed the job of a lifetime and worked for Florida Governor Reubin Askew for six years. In 1975 he rewarded my hard work with an opportunity to be a change-maker by promoting me to a position no woman had ever held before in a Florida Governor’s office. When Florida opened its first office in Washington DC, I got the chance to be among his first staff there, too. Governor Askew became my most important mentor, modeling how public service is an honorable calling that can bring about positive change. As his assistant for health and human services I saw him put the well-being of children and families first in countless programmatic and political decisions.

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In the meantime, I had gotten married, and our two children were born in Washington. When they were small, we decided to move back to Southern California where they could grow up in the warmth of the climate and our large and growing extended family. As we all settled into our new home, I stayed home with the children and became active in our community. As a volunteer, I maintained flexibility so I could almost always be there when the children got home from school. I cherish those years of early motherhood.

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I joined the League of Woman Voters of Pasadena and Los Angeles County and became a founding member of The Los Angeles Roundtable for Children, The Children’s Planning Council and the Pasadena Commission for Children and Youth. I began taking on paid consulting projects and in 1992 was asked by the National League of Cities to write Making Government Word for Your City’s Kids and provide consultation to city council members around the country who wanted to implement improvements.  This work dove-tailed nicely with my new role as west-coast lead trainer with the Center for Youth Development and Policy Research. Together, these two big clients gave me the confidence to become a full-time consultant and allow my husband to be the stay-at-home parent, working part-time on projects important to him.

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And that brings you up to the point where the book begins.  See what I mean about an apparently normal life? Until my body couldn’t hold it in any longer. My story shows dissociation as a survival tool that allows a person to thrive until it doesn’t anymore.  But then it helped me grow out of the pain and heal.  When everything in your life gets turned upside down you have to seek both your own core and also something larger than yourself to hold onto.  My core as a good person was created and protected by my internal community. The healing power of universal love as expressed in nature, and as understood by several indigenous cultures I was lucky enough to study, provided the spiritual foothold that helped heal the others.  That's the story.  The researcher/social worker in me sets it in the context of trauma survival and ACEs science.

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The bottom line that I hope people take away from my life and my book is this: emotional, physical, spiritual, healing is possible, no matter how deep the trauma (after all, I went from needing a wheelchair to hiking at Machu Picchu!), and that my dissociative disorder/superpower facilitated it all—my survival as a child, my life as an apparently normal person, and my healing and growth when it finally came time to release the secrets.